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The only thing we have power over in the universe is our own thoughts.
Rene Descartes
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Rene Descartes
Age: 53 †
Born: 1596
Born: March 31
Died: 1650
Died: February 11
Astronomer
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La Haye en Touraine
Descartes
Cartesius
Renatus Cartesius
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More quotes by Rene Descartes
Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.
Rene Descartes
This result could have been achieved either by his [God] endowing my intellect with a clear and distinct perception of everything about which I would ever deliberate, or simply by impressing the following rule so firmly upon my memory that I could never forget it: I should never judge anything that I do not clearly and distinctly understand.
Rene Descartes
Everybody thinks himself so well supplied with common sense that even those most difficult to please. . . never desire more of it than they already have.
Rene Descartes
Even those who have the weakest souls could acquire absolute mastery over all their passions if we employed sufficient ingenuity in training and guiding them.
Rene Descartes
How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?
Rene Descartes
If I simply refrain from making a judgment in cases where I do not perceive the truth with sufficient clarity and distinctness, then it is clear that I am behaving correctly and avoiding error.
Rene Descartes
Neither the true nor the false roots are always real sometimes they are imaginary that is, while we can always imagine as many roots for each equation as I have assigned, yet there is not always a definite quantity corresponding to each root we have imagined.
Rene Descartes
God alone is the author of all the motions in the world.
Rene Descartes
Thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones.
Rene Descartes
It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it.
Rene Descartes
Few look for truth many prowl about for a reputation of profundity by arrogantly challenging whichever arguments are the best.
Rene Descartes
But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.
Rene Descartes
If I go for the alternative which is false, then obviously I shall be in error if I take the other side, then it is by... chance that I arrive at the truth, and I shall still be at fault.... In this incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes the essence of error.
Rene Descartes
Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.
Rene Descartes
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
Rene Descartes
There is a little gland in the brain in which the soul exercises its functions in a more particular way than in the other parts.
Rene Descartes
If I found any new truths in the sciences, I can say that they follow from, or depend on, five or six principal problems which I succeeded in solving and which I regard as so many battles where the fortunes of war were on my side.
Rene Descartes
I know that I exist the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.
Rene Descartes
We never understand a thing so well,and make it our own, as when we have discovered it for ourselves.
Rene Descartes
I experienced in myself a certain capacity for judging which I have doubtless received from God, like all the other things that I possess and as He could not desire to deceive me, it is clear that He has not given me a faculty that will lead me to err if I use it aright.
Rene Descartes
